Room of Windows【翻译】

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgements…………..………………………………………….…..iii
PART I MORE FLAME THAN MARBLE: POETRY AND THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS……………………………………………………………………………………….1
References………………………………….………………………………17
PART II ROOM OF WINDOWS……………………..…………...…………………18
I. Skylights
Where It Began……………….………………….……..……..20
Script Manager…………….……………..……………………22
The Magic Lantern Show………………….……....………….24
xx……...……....……………………..…….…..……………….25
Self Portrait in Negative Space…………...………………….26
Shell, With Sky Inside…………………………..……………..27
Interventricle……………………………..……..……………...28
Taken from The Daily Mail………..……..…………………...30
Commute……………………………………….………………31
Self Portrait as Better Half…………………….……………...32
II. Camerata
Self Portrait as Museum…………….………………………...34
The Dead Sea, As We Saw It……………………………...…35
Invasive Species……….………………………………..…….37
Cipher……………………...……………….……..………....…38
iv
Coronation Ring…………………………………………..……40
On the Film found in a Block of Ice……….…………………41
III. Tracery
Vesica Piscis……………………………..…………..………...43
Yard Work……………………….…………………..………….44
To a Houseplant, Unwatered………….……………………...45
Speechless Aubade…………………….…………………..…46
Analogies for Prayer…………….…….………………………47
Touching Fire…………………..…….….…………………..…48
Self Portrait in a Fur Coat………………….…………………49
Red Eye………………………….…………..………..……….50
Disorder………………………..………………..….…..………51
Dust (To & From) ……………………..………………..……..52
Unself Portrait: Lampyrid and Plum………………………….54
v
PART I
MORE FLAME THAN MARBLE: POETRY AND THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS
1
In his memoirs, Pablo Neruda tells the story of a formative moment from his childhood: while playing in the backyard one day, he came upon a hole in the fence. As he watched, a child’s hand on the other side of the barrier placed a toy sheep through the hole. In response, Neruda placed one of his own treasures—a pinecone—through the hole, and watched it disappear in the hand. The two children never interacted again. Neruda concludes,
Just as I once left the pinecone by the fence, I have since left my words on the door of so many people who were unknown to me, people in prison, or hunted, or alone…maybe this small and mysterious exchange of gifts remained inside me also, deep and indestructible, giving my poetry light. (quoted in Bly 12)
Neruda’s illustrates a crucial aspect of the nature of art: it exists as a gift. This fact alters the experience of a work of art for both the creator and the viewer, who are the gift-givers. The gift is not just given by the artist to the viewer, left on the reader’s doorstep by the creator. Rather, it is an exchange, rooted in the relationships that exist around and in the text.
Generosity, in some form, characterizes any relationship; in Martin Buber’s words, “relation is reciprocity” (58). In art, reciprocity first involves the author reaching out to the other in order to create something that exists beyond both parties. As Buber identifies, “this is the eternal origin of art that a human being confronts a form that wants to become a work through him” (60). To call such awakening a “confrontation,” as Buber does, allows that reciprocity may not always be easy. It is, however, generative—to quote Muriel Rukeyser, “exchange is creation” (Gioia et al.,194). Echoing Neruda’s 2
terminology, Rukeyser describes this transaction as a “gift that is offered and received” (195).
Art, then, is inherently social—by participating in its making, whether viewers or creators, we place our gifts through the hole in the fence. The self reaches out to the other across the boundaries of time and space that separate the two. However, this social element also means that art is bound up in the systems and power struggles that govern the material world. As social beings, humans exist within systems of hierarchy that are essentially non-reciprocal: relationships are unequal, vertical rather than horizontal.
In poetry, the medium—language, or text—is a vehicle of social practices, structures, and institutions, reflecting such power relationships. The medium is corrupted, damaged, and disallowing of attempts at reciprocity. Consider Paul Celan, whose need, as a 20th-century Jewish poet, to write in the German language, contributed to his mental illness and eventual suicide. As poets, our attempts to give and accept gifts consistently fail; we are stymied by the social constructs in which we exist.
To combat these inequalities, we must return again to that inherent reciprocity, finding it in the creative process, and bringing it to the forefront of our thinking about art-making. Generosity toward another confronts hierarchy through leveling the different actors in the creation of a work of art. Through the mutuality of an exchange of “gifts,” the different actors in the creation and existence of a poem can undermine the power structures that govern texts. Confronting, challenging, and enlarging each other, they transform that initial clash into an exchange. The experience of the poem—the gift—
3
results from the efforts of all the actors who contributed to its creation. Rukeyser identifies three such reciprocal subjects: poet, poem, and witness (or reader). We can term these as the following: the creator, the viewer, and the medium (the text itself). Within every poem, reciprocal relationships exist between all of these subjects: between the self and society, the reader and author, mediated through the text. The creator, or poet, offers a gift to the reader, who responds with her own gift to the author—a broadening of meaning. Additionally, the individual poet receives knowledge and tools from her tradition, offering herself and her own work in response.
The relationship between the individual and the community exists in a social context. Primarily, a poet speaks as a writer among writers, both living and dead. She is part of a lineage: that Tradition explored by T.S. Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” As the essay states, “no poet has his complete meaning alone” (Kwasny 262). Rather, a poet creates in relationship with dead writers, who impact the form and content of her work, whether or not she is aware of their influence. As Eliot details, the “main current” of tradition influences the poet, who then contributes her own work to the swift-moving current. The exchange, then, is this: Tradition offers its experience as a gift to the poet, who gives her own work as a gift to the stream of Tradition. One image from the essay sums up this historical concurrence: “a line in the present moment of the past.” This relationship, then, disrupts the tyranny of linear time, undercutting the hierarchical systems that govern because of their existence over long periods of time.
For individual poets, however, it can be difficult to properly position oneself in relationship with tradition. In order to reach reciprocity, this relationship involves a kind of transformation. For Eliot, who advocated the cultivation of impersonality, this 4
transformation must occur in the writer. Other writers, exploring this same relationship, have offered alternative solutions. Harold Bloom’s Anxieties of Influence, for instance, concludes that the artist must destroy one’s poetic parent in order to make a space for new creation. Yet, both of these solutions involve escape, pointing to the tension inherent in this reciprocity—it is not an easy “exchange” of gifts.
Rather, like language itself, the relationship between a poet and her influences is bound up in destruction, power, and oppression. As Julia Kristeva explored, in Revolution in Poetic Language, the relationship between a text and its influential discourses reflects similar uneasiness. Describing intertextual space, she notes: "Whatever the semantic content of a text, its condition as a signifying practice presupposes the existence of other discourses […]. This is to say that every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses which impose a universe on it" (104-05). Imposition is the key here—rather than championing escape from self, as Eliot does, Kristeva describes a loss of self. She identifies that the collaboration between individual and outside discourses is an unequal one, in which the exterior constantly imposes.
Thus, like the material world, the world of the text is ruled by injustice; an inequality of power corrupts the collaboration. Faced with hegemony, the question, then, seems to be whether this collaboration can be called reciprocal at all. Eliot and Kristeva share, however, a rejection of essentialism. They are not concerned with validating a naïve sense of self as essence, but with the changes that govern and mold the artist and her work. Eliot’s position, particularly, though, was not consistent. Elsewhere in his prose, 5
he identifies that there is something nebulous that is special to all poetry, permanently and consistently present throughout it.
The artist’s relationship with tradition involves a loss of the self, but, in order for reciprocity to be reached, there must also be a preservation of the self. Reciprocal relationship involves a balance of generosity and autonomy. The individual must be able to challenge, and, in order to do so, must maintain some sort of self. In attempting to navigate the tricky relationship with influence, Kristeva and Eliot both turn to an extreme reaction. Rather, reciprocity must be characterized by balance between autonomy and influence. The challenge to power and injustice comes from the willingness of an individual to assert the self in opposition to the whole. This modicum of challenge in the midst of generosity creates a different kind of reciprocity, in which the “gift” that is given is one that may not be received or desired.
Poets who belong to marginalized groups, particularly aware of power’s imbalances, choose to use poetry to protest and to rectify. Since the 1970s, one of the most prominent feminist poets has been Adrienne Rich, who deals with the theme of language as oppression in both her poetics and her poems. Rich’s baseline assumption is that language itself is patriarchal—consider Eliot’s exclusionary reference, quoted earlier to “the poet” as male. In poetry, the patriarchy asserts itself through traditional forms and structure. In her 1971 essay, “‘When We Dead Awaken’: Writing as Re-Vision,” Rich theorized the rejection of form as a feminist act, asserting:
The specter of this kind of male judgment, along with the active discouragement and thwarting of her needs by a culture controlled by males, has created problems for 6
the woman writer: problems of contact with herself, problems of language and style, problems of energy and survival. (Gioia et al., 314)
For Rich, female writers could grapple with these problems through breaking out of traditional forms; they “ha[ve] to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives” (Gioia et al., 318).
For Rich, a truly feminist poetry is composed of “snatches” and “fragments” that break out of the controlled discourse of traditional forms. This new kind of poetry still acknowledges tradition—indeed, it needs the organized system to exist—but it does so in an antipathetic way. Her own work has consistently explored this tension. In “The Burning of Paper instead of Children” (1969), both form and content deal with these concerns, exploring language as an oppressor and a liberator. On the literal level, the poem explores the conflicted nature of language. Historically, it has been a tool of oppression and exclusion—the speaker describes literary depictions of sex as the “words of a man / in pain” (58-59). Yet, the form of the poem, which unfolds of patch-worked “fragments” and “snatches,” enacts a disruption of language’s tyranny. “This is the oppressor’s language,” the poem’s speaker says, “yet I need it to talk to you.” Here, the speaker acknowledges the brokenness of the medium while simultaneously using it to initiate a conversation with the reader. Through this disruption, one finds, there lies some kind of “relief” and “release.” As the speaker acknowledges, “the fracture of order / the repair of speech / [is necessary] to overcome this suffering” (46-48). It is not only that the speaker needs the language of the oppressor, but also that speech itself is capable of assuaging suffering. 7
In attempting to rectify injustice, however, Rich still relies on binary determinations. By painting language as strictly the tool of masculine oppression, and by relying on ecriture feminine to rectify it, she still relies on broad generalizations concerning gender. This forces the self into a singular identity, rather than allowing individuals to exist in a state of possibility, an “open mesh” of identity. She sets up a chasm between women and men, without gaps or dissonances concerning gender. There are no holes in Rich’s fence through which one might slip. Her emphasis on complete difference serves to reinforce binaries, rather than inviting generosity and allowing for spaces between them.
A turn from binaries takes place through allowing a third subject—Rukeyser’s “witness”—to participate in the making of the poem, as well. Address to the reader has been a part of every poetic movement. Consider Dante’s asides and apostrophes, which often break the narrative of the Divine Comedy’s text, or, more directly, Baudelaire’s address to the reader: “hypocrite lecteur! - mon semblable, - mon frère!" With the rise of post-structuralism and reader-response theory, consideration of the reader’s involvement in a work of art gained popularity. Now, it is typically assumed that the reader does not merely receive, but also makes meaning, through reciprocal relationships with the poet and with the text itself. To embrace this dynamic is to advocate for the horizontal relationship that would transform art, decentralizing the power inequalities at its heart.
Within contemporary poetics, Louise Glück emerges as an author who has consistently advocated for reader as an active participant in the making of the poem, rather than a passive outsider. In the essay, “Invitation and Exclusion,” she uses her 8
own reading experience as example: “To read Eliot for me is to feel the presence of the abyss; to read Rilke is to sense the mattress under the window” (PT 114). Yet, the creation of this shared experience is not entirely the reader’s responsibility. The poet must first reach out, initiating collaboration. For Glück, this does not always happen; she criticizes Wallace Stevens, for example, who makes her feel “superfluous, part of some marginal throng.” Rather, reading ought to “contain the thrill of making; as a child I felt myself the author of those songs I read” (PT 115). This meeting between reader and author does not result in certainty or a verifiable meaning. Rather, it is what Glück calls “silence,” that which occasions Keats’s “mysteries, uncertainties, doubts” (PT 75). Though the metaphor is different, the result is the same: the creation of mystery.
In her own work, Glück invites the reader to experience the “thrill of making,” to create a silence together with the poet. In “Seated Figure” (1990), this shared silence is revealed through the speaker’s address to an unnamed “you” (TFFB 164). The poem’s speaker attempts to impose a meaning on her interactions with the addressee:
I wanted us to walk like lovers
arm in arm in the summer evening
and believed so powerfully in that projection
that I had to speak, I had to press you to stand (4-7)
This space dramatizes the action of the challenge that poetry offers to autonomy—the self demands a relationship with the other. The speaker’s desire, however, is not rooted in a physical relationship, but in imagination. “Why did you let me speak?” the speaker asks, implying that in a shared silence, an acceptance of the other rather than imposition of desire, something transformative could have taken place. In this question, 9
too, a challenge is offered to the reader, the “you” who has let the speaker impose herself. Thus, the reader has agency in the creation of this shared silence, by keeping hesitation and mystery between the subjects.
Thus, the poet and the reader together “make” the poem. Because this dynamic deals with individual persons, the idea of balance is key here. Navigating an author’s personal vision with external influence or power. In my own experience as a poet, I have struggled with how to find the boundaries between personal autonomy and the other. Receptivity and reciprocity: how can they coexist within a medium that is so individual as language? Here, the third element—the text—becomes crucial. In creating an individual poem using the medium of language, it can be difficult to feel that I am cultivating reciprocity in my own work. Where is the invitation to the other in my work, using the medium of language? For me, as a poet, expanding beyond my individual process and medium has been a crucial means of discovering reciprocity.
Indeed, the text of a poem often expands beyond the medium of language. Historically, many poets have created visual art in concurrence with their poems. In his illuminated manuscripts, William Blake combined the text of his poems with visual art that surrounded and worked together with the language of the poem. Although the illuminations could certainly be viewed as separate works, Blake himself seems to have thought of them as single pieces—two parts uniting into a single whole. As he wrote in The Four Zoas, “But infinitely beautiful the wondrous work arose…many a window many a door And many a division let it in & out into the vast unknown” (Blake 20). This description calls to mind Denise Levertov’s analysis of the surface features of a poem: “content and form are in a state of dynamic interaction; the understanding of whether an

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